On 12/25/05, The Hooded Man <hoodedman(a)shadowedcorner.com> wrote: There is no conspiracy theory needed. You ask "would the foundation do this", but we need to first be clear on what 'this' means. If 'this' means treating our authors in any way which is unethical today, I stand firmly that the answer is clearly no. In the future, I can not answer because my crystal ball is not that powerful. If 'this' means to work to cause changes to be made to future versions of the licenses which temporarily increase the foundations ease at the expense at removing the protection of the authors from unethical actions in the future, I must answer a resounding yes because it is demonstrably true. The Wikimedia foundation has been quietly advocating to the Creative Commons and the Free Software foundations alterations to further versions of the appropriate licenses which will allow the operators of websites such as Wikipedia the authority to permit redistribution of content submitted to their website with attribution to the site rather than the author of the content. In effect, the *single* remaining tangible return an author of freely licensed content receives (their authorship credit) will be removed and granted to the priesthood of intellectual property barons who have apparently earned the right to take credit for the blood and sweat of a world of people because of their great feat of operating a website. For the latest in the implementation of this grand vision, take a look at the terms of the CC-Wiki license, or the mysteriously vague attribution terms so cowardly sneaked into CC-BY-SA v2.0. These changes to cc-by-sa could have been implemented as another CC license flag 'CA' (community attribution) but instead it was decided to include the changes into the root license with no mention in the layman version, presumably because such a change would fail to change the license of existing works against the consent of the authors and would probably too much attention to this difficult issue. Although this has not been widely noticed, I certainly am not the only one... For example see the interesting distribution terms on enwiki User:Jamesday. The argument used to advance this change is that, somehow, by being submitted to a collaborative authorship site a document no longer has authors but is somehow authored by the 'community'. In some cases a compelling argument can indeed be made that there was no effective single person author of the work, but even in these cases (which I contend are rare) it takes a fantastic leap of faith to make the claim that some organization (non-profit or otherwise) is the sole official legal voice of the above mentioned ephemeral 'community' of authors simple because they operate a website which is used by that community. But, indeed, that is exactly what is being claimed and what is being swallowed because it's a lot easier to pretend that a website operator represents the community because the reality of the matter (that the community is a shifting cloud of unclear membership and representation) is useless for solving the real challenges presented by the requirement of preserving something as simple as authorship credit in the world of paper. Basically we're reaching a point where silly details like the moral obligation to credit the authors of a work are hindering the grand vision of the knowledge of the world made available to all at the lowest cost possible. This is a hard problem, so rather than dealing with it head on, the details are being swept under the rug. Licenses will and have been retroactively changed to reflect this prioritization of the quick solution over ethical obligations. Normally I would not worry about this, because such changes which defy the character of the licenses agreed to by the creators of content would never stand... but the more I consider the issue the more I realize how many differing forces will support such changes for both laudable (in the case of the foundation) and selfish reasons, and it leaves me feeling unsure and angry. I fear that we, the community of authors and spokesmen who support the propagation of knowledge freely to the world, have become so impatient with the slowness of achieving our goals that we have begun to take steps to extinguish the protective flame of decentralization which immunizes our work from the privatization, exploitation, and commercial imprisonment by greedy self interests, simply because the resulting legal obligations of that decentralized existence have become a temporary hindrance to our important goals. Such a move to promote the notion that the operator of a telecommunication service (isn't that what the foundation claims to be when it invokes the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA as a reassurance that our negligent handling of copyright matters will go unpunished) is granted a special position of unique control over the creative works by the users of that service will not only be supported by the operators of Wiki's who are currently so inconvenienced, but it will also be strongly supported by the newly re-merged telecommunications giants so eager to exercise their believed right to extract maximum profit from every bit transferred across their glass. The words "theft" and "steal" constantly create confusion when applied to information, it is unfortunate that we use them. You are quite correct that no one can take away what we already have, but it is quite possible that through changes in license that powerful interests will be able to claim special rights over the works of others because of their ownership of telecommunications infrastructure at least that is the notion embodied by the proposed license changes. So that while you will be free to use the content you helped create, another group, by virtue of their operation of a telecommunications service, will be far more free. You can not claim that you are free so long as there is another group which has more freedom with the work you created. Welcome to the new serfdom. Today we love and trust our telecommunications service providing masters, but what changes does the future bring?